One could point to the idea that souls are individually created, not belonging to the population (species, …), and thus not particularly the subject of evolution (I.e. “the change in the frequency of inherited traits in a population”).
I recommend the BibleProject podcasts about the soul (nephesh) mentioned in the comment of @SkovandOfMitaze
In the Hebrew context, Nephesh (translated as psukhe in Septuagint) seems to speak about the physical ‘me’ (many meanings: living creature, life, me, person, etc.). If you want to speak about the immaterial eternal being, perhaps you should use some other word than ‘soul’ because using ‘soul’ may be confusing - the pagan concepts of ‘soul’ gets mixed with the Hebrew concept.
The BibleProject podcasts also discuss the words of Jesus you mentioned. If Jesus had a Hebrew mindset (culturally Hebrew thinking behind the Greek scriptures), the interpretation may be different than what we children of pagan cultures assume. That part of the podcast is perhaps the most questionable part but an interesting possibility.
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In my view the answer is no! Evolution is a natural process involving space, time and matter. It is post creation.
Billy Graham once described the soul as the part of us that communes with God and enters His presence at death, awaiting the resurrection of the body.
That is the Biblical view and I agree.
This is what I believe.
The soul is supernatural and being supernatural it is given by God, who is supernatural, in a supernatural way for the very purpose stated by Reverend Graham.
I do not believe as scientists we give enough credibility to the supernatural.
Think about it. Creation had a cause (most scientists would believe this) which existed before creation (the natural). So like Hebrews 11:3 says “what is seen (creation) was made from things that are not visible (pre creation and supernatural)”. Also consider Ephesians chapter 1 beginning at verse 3 that before the creation of the world out of his love for man God predestined man to be found holy and blameless in his sight through Jesus Christ our Lord.
This is an awsome statement because it means that before creation from some supernatural realm God had a plan of salvation for a yet to be created man who would also sin. God knew about that. Think about that.
That supernatural realm was eternity past but is also future and the soul was the means to get the holy and blameless man there when man dieshis physical death as his spiritual life exists through the soul.
So evolution is a material or natural sequence of events resulting in the Homo sapien, us and is totally independent of the supernatural side of man, his soul, spiritual nature and God’s image (has to be spiritual or supernatural because God is).
I like to think of evolution as theistic evolution, i.e., how God created.
As scientist we spend our time finding out how God did things, and is truly marvelous, while the Bible tells us what he did.
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I’m guessing after the exile the Hebrew understanding of the soul began to change significantly in various regions and there was probably a growing diversity in thought on the issue. So that is a big if. One cannot just assume Jesus held to whatever we imagine the traditional Hebrew interpretation to be. Jesus lived in his own time and it’s hard to even know how much diversity there was on the issue in first-century Palestine.
But also, much of the OT might not have a drawn out concept of a soul but most of it has little about heaven or an afterlife as well. Do we all just go down to Sheol when we die? Or can concepts develop and change over time? Can foreign influences be God moving belief in the right direction?
I know a lot of historical baggage comes with the notion of souls and they seem to be taboo on this forum but I can’t see dispensing with them. When I read the words of Jesus or Hebrews or other parts of the NT Insee distinctions between body, mind, soul, spirit. How much Platonic baggage I want to accept is a different matter.
But you speak of the traditional Hebrew understanding:
“May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”
That is from a self professed Pharisee, a very Jewish Jew, in the first century and he seems to distinguish between spirit, body and soul.
The argument that the OT does not have a very drawn out concept of the soul does little for me because ai think scripture is just progressive on the issue like it is the afterlife. I will look at the Bible project video though. I also have Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls ordered and arriving within the week.
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I find that fascinating that someone would assume the existence of a soul would somehow contradict evolutionary processes. That baffles me.
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Agreed.
If one has no problem with a supernatural soul having any effect in the natural world - for example, effecting a change in momentum in violation of Newton’s laws of motion -
On the one hand, one who accepts the existence of the soul and much of natural science, why draw the line at accepting evolution?
On the other hand, one who accepts everything in natural science, why single out evolution as one;s reason for rejecting belief in the soul?
Either position baffles me, too.
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Weirdness, especially given how many embryos fail to implant – are those souls wasted?
Also weird since it assumes that the soul is a certain quantity of substance that can be divided.
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The BibleProject video is short and does not go into the details. Podcasts do that; a series of four podcasts about the Nephesh/soul, with lengths of 27 - 55 minutes. The verse you cited is discussed in the fourth podcast, the Q+R (Question + Response) part.
A generally interesting observation lifted in the podcasts is how the OT does not give exact descriptions or classifications of things like afterlife or what we are. Because of our cultural context (worldview), we want to know and have exact classifications/descriptions of what is a soul, a spirit, a body, what happens after death, etc. That is our way to think, not the way of the OT writers.
Because the writers of the NT had a Hebrew cultural understanding and probably were thinking many matters through that, the way how they express matters in Greek is not uniform. If someone is interested to know more about that, there is discussion about this in the fourth podcast.
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I could point to the idea of reincarnation but what would be the point since I certainly don’t believe in reincarnation or the rational soul of the Gnostics connected to that belief.
There is only the spiritual body which grows from the physical like a plant from a seed. That is how Paul describes it in 1 Cor 15. The spiritual body does not evolve but the physical body is a product of evolution – it is right there in its DNA makeup. But while the spiritual body grows from the physical, I don’t believe it is completely determined by it. I think it has more to do with our own choices and personal identity and thus there may be things about the physical body (such as disease and deformity) which we would never choose or identify ourselves with.
Anyway the question was whether believing in the soul poses some kind of problem for accepting evolution, and I do not see how. I don’t see how what you have posted has altered this.
I do not recognize Billy Graham as having any authority on such matters.
I have not seen the videos, but like the way the Bible Project approaches things. Would it be fair that the ANE view was one more of unity of body, mind, and spirit in what makes us one person rather than the rather fragmented view we have in this day, perhaps inherited a bit from gnostisism?
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Yes. That is a key conclusion in the podcasts.
Another one is that we are fundamentally bodily creatures, ment to live bodily life in this and the future post-resurrection life (although OT does not teach clearly about the life after death). In OT, much of the description about the future is in the form of poetic expressions that probably should not be interpreted literarily.
Although the podcasts focus on the Hebrew bible (OT), the same conclusions seem to be true in NT, although in NT, there are more verses mentioning the different aspects of what a human is. It seems that the words (soul, spirit, etc) are used in partly overlapping sense, bringing up the unity of the whole, rather than a clear separation of the different aspects.
Strong interpretations and even doctrines have been formed based on very little information, maybe just a single verse. A single verse is not a credible basis for a doctrine.
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This is something that all too many overlook: as with any human literature, the OT writers assumed the common knowledge of the day. I can say, “Oh, he thinks he’s Harry Potter” and people will get the reference; there are also a lot of bits that aren’t so obvious – a generational example is pay phones; I had to explain to a college girl what a phone booth and a pay phone were, and that’s not that big a gap historically! Some references in the OT show this directly, e.g. “Is it not written in the Book of Jasher?” shows an expectation that everyone would have know about this book. But the pay phone “gap” shows why understanding scripture in its historical context is absolutely critical: little bits of knowledge get lost every generation, and to know what’s being talked about we have to know what the world was like at the time of the writer and the original audience. That includes knowing what kind of literature each part was seen as, which among other things means being open to the fact that they had types of literature we don’t and that some of those could be quite alien.
Openings often announced to an audience what they were about to hear. A contemporary example might be the phrase “Once upon a time…” which tells us this is likely to be a “fairy tale”. In the time of Moses and right on through the Judges at least, a phrase that would have announced a literary type was, "In the beginning elohim . . . " because most ANE creation stories started out that way (at the same time, the use of the singular verb [“he created”] hinted that this was a quite different story they were about to hear).
So from just three words the audience would have recognized that this was going to be about creation. And that brought expectations we wouldn’t have because we think in science terms while they thought in mythological/cosmological terms; in an ANE creation story there is always some kind of conflict where the god(s) overcomes some foe, so they would have expected some sort of battle; there was always chaos and darkness and light; and so on. The Genesis 1 writer includes all that but tweaks it – YHWH-Elohim doesn’t conquer using weapons, He just gives commands (or exerts His will) and the foe is subdued: Creating light and shoving darkness aside to make room for it is a battle, one that declared that Yahweh had no need to stoop so low as to actually fight the darkness and its accompanying chaos, He just did it with no greater effort than a man might exert by opening his mouth. So in just a few verses the kind of literature is announced and then is tweaked in a way that declares that YHWH-Elohim is greater than all other gods combined – and that message arises because they would have recognized the type of literature.
So there are things that the OT didn’t give exact descriptions of (or even mentioned) because they all recognized their own cultural context and worldview – and we can only get the message if we hear it at least approximately like they did.
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Yes. Indeed this is where ancient folks had no problem with a “Yahweh in Heaven” and a “Yahweh walking on earth” – at the same time – but still only counted one Yahweh: multiplicity in unity wasn’t that tough a concept since they held it already about their own existence. A person was simultaneously a body, a mind, and a spirit, yet was just one person, and that person could be referred to as the body (“they laid him in the grave”) or as the mind or as the spirit.
This shades (pun intended) into the view of the afterlife, where the body was in the grave and thus the person was in the grave, yet at the same time the mind and spirit were gone from the body and were in the underworld, but since a person wasn’t a whole person without a body then though it was kind and spirit in the underworld they still had a body even though that body was (also) in a grave – and thus the name “shade”, an entity with substance though not solid like a usual body. Being a shade was unnatural since being human means having a material body, and a body rotting in a grave was also unnatural since being human requires being mind and spirit as well (which BTW informs the matter of the resurrection form the dead; the resurrected body will be solid as ours are in this life, but will not be one that can end up in a grave [again]).
I blame Plato. Our beginning Greek (yeah, Plato was considered “beginning”) class used to curse at Plato every time we ran into the idea of disconnected souls drifting about or waiting for a new body or whatever – “Bloody Plato” was our most common epithet (to have said “F***ing Plato” would have resulted in a dropped grade for the day by two marks).
And on demanding that the scriptures have to speak in terms of one’s own worldview.
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I did not mean that the soul evolves. Where did you get that. The soul has nothing to do with evolution but God still grants each individual a soul. FYI Billy Graham is an authority compared to everyone else.
What about “identical” (I.e. monozygotic) twins? Before separation, how many souls?
That was not my intent. Sorry that I didn’t make it clear. I was trying to say that I found NO conllict.
Interestingly, the word Hebrew word for ensouled being, “nephesh,” is also used of higher animals, such as livestock. This suggests that there is more to the soul than the common Sunday school understanding. I lean towards a physicalist view of the soul where it is more of an emergent property of the body itself. If the soul is more akin to consciousness, I would say that evolution is not a problem for the existence of the soul. Nonetheless, even if you did hold to a more classical Greek understanding of the soul, you could just say that biological evolution was used to create the body and then a soul was infused in it. The latter is a view doesn’t seem viable to me since it is hard to argue that higher animals like dogs and chimpanzees don’t have qualities we associate with a soul, such as reason and the capacity of love, to at least a limited extant, but it is logically consistent and can be reconciled with biological evolution.
I am bring this up, not to argue about souls, but because it seems to me that the scientific discoveries about human reproduction, really taking off in the late 19th & early 20th centuries, present a far more serious problem in ancient traditions, far more than evolution or the age of the world. Yet all that I hear about is evolution and the age of the world.
Is it because the challenges proposed by the sciences of reproduction are too difficult? Is it just easier to joke about being physically related to monkeys?